Vulnerability
by Flavato Forever
Summary: The post-finale lives of Don Flack and Jamie Lovato - how they navigate their lives together, balancing work and marriage. **I do not own the cover image** CSI:NY, Flamie, Flavato
1. Chapter 1

She put a hand on her stomach, not knowing what exactly she expected to feel there. Some magic that had transcended the ages of its existence and landed on her, in a too-small apartment in the middle of a too-violent city? Some kinship with the millions of women who had felt the same thing, many more than once, many in worse situations than she was in now? Some explanation for the ever-present chill of the tile on her thighs, even as her world began to distort around her into something unknown and terrifyingly beautiful?

She did not feel this. She did not feel anything but skin and muscle, the same skin and muscle that had always been there – through middle school, covered in baggy tee shirts, high school, exposed in the short tops her mother hated, through her work and her engagement and her marriage. It didn't feel different. But it was different. Everything was different.

The harsh sound of bone hitting the wood of the bathroom door infiltrated her cocoon of introspective contemplation.

"Lovato?" The word was slurred with sleep. Her throat tightened, remembering the same voice – sharp, staccato, then, fully aware of what it was doing – telling her he wasn't ready for this. She remembered him walking away, leaving her in the dark interrogation room, more alone than she had ever felt before in her life.

She clears her throat as quietly as she can. "Yeah?"

"What're you doing? I need to get in there."

She manages to lift herself up off the ground, gripping the corner of the vanity with one hand and a small, white plastic stick in the other. She pulls open the bathroom door, revealing her sleepy husband in sweatpants and that stupid NYPD shirt he always wore to bed. As if she needed to be reminded how dangerous their everyday lives were.

"Don," she says, her voice cracking slightly. "I'm pregnant."

* * *

She was braced for the worst – a fight loud enough to wake the neighbors, or a silence so deep it could drown her and their child in it. Instead, his eyes lit up, pulling his body out of its sleep-deprived stupor, and he hugged her so hard she couldn't breathe.

"Really?" he says, pulling back.

She nods, dazed.

"I – we – I love you," he stumbles, and pulls the pregnancy test out of her hands. As if she might lie.

"I thought," she begins, and stops. "I love you, too."

He leads her into the living room. She regards the dingy sofa, which had been cuddling with Don before she had even known him, and the coffee table, with edges sharp enough to take a child's eyes out.

"You're sure?"

"Yes. I took, like, four tests."

Don kept talking, but she wasn't listening. From his face, he seemed over the moon.

"Stop," she said suddenly. It came out harsher than she had intended. His mouth stopped moving, hanging open, mid-word, for a moment, before closing. The excitement never left his eyes.

"Don, we can't do this. We live in a tiny apartment in the middle of New York City, and we're both police officers, and I have no idea how to be a mom, and we could die any day-" Her voice cut off, overwhelmed by the tornado of emotions threatening to rip a hole through her ribcage. Her husband was shaking his head.

"Jamie, I know. I've thought it over a thousand times, and, to be honest, I'm terrified. But there is nothing in the whole world I would rather do than raise children with you. And New York cops raise kids all the time – Jo did it, Lindsay and Danny do it. We'll be _fine_."

She felt her lips begin to tremble. Don pulled her head to his chest just as the tears began to fall. He ran his fingers over her back gently.

"Mac called while you were in the bathroom. The office is closed today because of the weather. Let's go back to sleep."

She allows him to pull her back to their bedroom, willing herself not to consider the last time she had lied in their bed with a baby in her stomach. She turned her thoughts away from the blood, the pain, the screaming, the rush to the hospital, the somber-eyed doctor apologizing…

She had begun to shake with sobs. Don covered them both up with the thick down blanket, despite the heat, and twisted so he was facing her.

"We'll be fine."

"I know," she chokes before pressing a hand firmly on her stomach again. _We have to be._

* * *

Two sleepless hours later, she sat next to her husband on the couch, watching some stupid TV show neither of them was paying attention to. The remains of an elaborate breakfast, cooked by Don while he hummed nursery rhymes, sat on the murderous coffee table. Rain pelted the window with such force that she was thankful, for once, not to have to go to work.

"We shouldn't tell anyone yet," Don said.

"What?"

"Isn't that what they say? You don't tell anyone, besides family, of course, until – what is it?"

"10 to 12 weeks. Until the risk of miscarriage goes down."

He looks at her. "I didn't mean-"

"I know. And that's fine, if you want to do that. I don't even know how far along I am. We have to call the doctor."

"We will. But no one's open today."

"You brought it up."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize." She realized she was being too clipped, and sighed. "I'm sorry. I'm just – I didn't expect for it to happen now."

"Neither did I." He pushed the hair out of her face. "But I'm_ so excited_."

"I guess I am, too."

The solemnity of the sentence made them both laugh. He kissed her cheek.

They would be fine.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Their first doctor's appointment was in two hours. Jamie had gripped his hand as he called the OBGYN's office. He had repeated everything the warm, soft-spoken nurse on the other end had said, for his wife's benefit. Her hands were shaking when he hung up.

He had watched her bend lower and lower throughout the day, threatening to break underneath the weight of her fears. She had walked aimlessly throughout the apartment yesterday, gently placing two or three fingers on every piece of furniture, every object in sight. She did not move anything, or say anything. She simply walked around and touched the accumulation of their combined sixty-nine years on the planet. She kept a glass of ice water in her hand at all times, but did not drink it; when the ice melted, she would pour the glass out and make a new one. He did not dare ask her why.

"Flack," Mac called from across the precinct. "Where's the Gibson file?"

"Danny has it," he said back, before returning the daunting pile of paperwork in front of him. Jamie was sitting at the desk a few yards over, bent over her own mass of forms. She kept glancing at her watch, then at him. When she thought no one was looking, he saw her put her hand to her stomach, and he smiled slightly.

"Hey, Don." Flack turned to see Jo standing over him, holding out yet another form he had to sign. "How's everything?"

"Fine," he says, perhaps too quickly. Jo sips her cup of coffee before replying.

"How's Jamie? She seems quiet today."

"She wasn't feeling well this morning. I tried to convince her to stay home, but she wouldn't have it." It was the truth – he had held her hair that morning while she vomited into the toilet. He had been unable to tell if her back was convulsing from the retching or the sobs she had attempted to silence. She'd said she was fine at least twelve times, but she hadn't said ten words otherwise.

Jo went over to talk to his Jamie, who smiled dutifully, though it did not touch her solemn eyes. He wondered if Jo noticed. Probably, to a coworker, his wife played the part well – a slightly sick, overly stubborn cop who would be fine, given a few days to get the bug out of her system. She shook her head when Jo offered to take her home.

"Don's offered half a dozen times, Jo. I'm fine, really." Did the older woman notice Jamie's fingers tapping on her thigh as she lied?

Ninety minutes later, they sat in the never-ending traffic of New York City, ten blocks from the OBGYN. Jamie seemed to be admiring the pedestrians lining the sidewalk, the normalcy of their days compared to hers.

"We haven't told my parents," she said suddenly.

"What?"

"That I'm pregnant. We haven't told my parents."

"I thought you wanted to wait until after the doctor confirmed it?"

She nodded. "Oh. Yeah."

Don internally sighed.

When they finally walked into the doctor's office, Jamie went to sit by the window while he checked in. By the sound of her voice, the nurse at reception was the same woman he had talked to on the phone.

"We have a 4:30 appointment with Dr. Robinson," Don said.

"Oh, yes, Mr. and Mrs. Flack?"

"Yes."

"Great. A nurse will come get you in the next five or ten minutes."

Flack smiled, and then went to sit down next to his wife, who was skimming through a fashion magazine. He watched her eyes glance at the pictures of dangerously thin women in over-the-top dresses before tossing the magazine back on the end table where she had gotten it. He took one of her hands in his.

Six minutes later, a heavy-set, older nurse called their names. She led them to an examination room, where Jamie sat on a bed covered in white paper. He sat in a chair by her side. The nurse explained she would have to take a blood test to confirm that Jamie was pregnant. Jamie nodded without saying anything. She did not flinch when the needle went into her arm; she stared with wide eyes at the vile of her blood. Don thought back to his last blood test, where she reminded him not to look at the blood as it was coming out; it would only make it hurt more, she had said. His wife did not acknowledge the nurse when she said the doctor would be back with the result in twenty minutes.

Don gave up on conversation after the third question to which he had received a one-word answer. He simply sat watching his wife, who didn't take her eyes off the floor.

The silence loomed over them. Faintly, he could hear talking from the waiting room; even quieter sounds of New York rush hour permeated the thick walls of the examination room. He could hear the sounds of his own deep breaths, and his wife's shallow gulps of air.

The door opened exactly twenty-seven minutes later. A man in a white coat and intellectual-looking glasses waltzed in, smiling at them both. He seemed either oblivious to or unaffected by the tension in the room.

"Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Flack. You're going to be parents.

"The test came back positive?" Jamie asked. Don couldn't tell how she felt about it.

"Yes, ma'am," Dr. Robinson said. "Now, it looks like you're about three weeks along, which means your first ultrasound won't be for just over a month. I'm going to start you on some prenatal vitamins to make sure everything develops normally…" The doctor kept talking. Don reached his hand out and squeezed Jamie's. She looked down at him from her perch on the bed and smiled for the first time in two days.

Once they got back into their apartment, Jamie turned to Don, grinning ear to ear. "We're going to be parents." She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, surprising her husband.

He pressed one hand to the small of her back, the other to the back of her head, deepening the kiss. When Jamie pulls back a minute later, she's still smiling.

"I love you," he says breathlessly.

"I love you, too."

"Does this mean we can tell our family?" he asks.

She nods.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

They sat on that same old couch in the living room, Jamie's head resting on Don's shoulder. The killer coffee table, now castrated with rubber bumpers around the edges, held up Don's legs, which ran perpendicular to his wife's. The weight of her huge belly compressed the already dingy cushions so much she could feel the frame of the sofa pressing onto her back. Months ago, she'd traded her customary late-night bottle of beer for a glass of water, and Don had loyally followed suit, despite her good-humored protests. They didn't have a single ounce of alcohol in the apartment now.

Don was intently watching some football game, which she wasn't paying any close attention to. She was thinking, instead, of the ultrasound picture on the fridge, the fresh coat of pink paint in the guest bedroom, the two cribs carefully put together in opposite corners. The calendar hanging in the kitchen displayed lines of eager red X's steadily approaching the due date, now a mere six days away. She hadn't been allowed to work in three weeks because her feet ached so badly she couldn't stand, and her stomach was so wide now it was difficult to sit up straight. Her mother had tried to convince them to send Jamie to her house on Long Island, at least until the babies came, but Jamie had adamantly refused every time.

The first time she had felt her babies move, she was sitting in the bedroom getting dressed. She had frozen with an expression of such shock on her face that, when Don came in from the shower, he'd thought she'd had a stroke. It was then that she had truly felt her gravity shifting, her purpose in life no longer to protect herself and love her husband, but something else entirely. Something terrifyingly beautiful. Through the months of morning sickness, aching bones and cravings that surprised even her four-time-pregnant mother, Jamie had thought of nothing but holding her children in her arms.

"Don?" Jamie said.

"Yeah?" He tore his eyes away from the screen, where, she guessed, from the sound of his period cursing, his favored team was losing.

She moved his hands to her stomach, cradling the restless babies. As always, his eyes glowed with love and pride. She imagined the same expression, flanked by a few more years' worth of wrinkles, on her husband on their girls' birthdays, their first day of kindergarten. She imagined him intimidating every boy who dared step within a hundred yards of his daughters, him crying as they went off to college, him linking arms with them as they walked down the aisle. She imagined every sleepless night, every headache induced by crying infants, crying toddlers, crying teenagers. She imagined herself falling more and more in love with her husband every day.

Don leaned down and kissed Jamie on her forehead. "It's late."

Jamie agreed, and allowed him to help her off the couch and into her haphazard dance of a bedtime routine. She would waddle to the bathroom, brush her teeth, shoulders thrust back to counteract the weight of her stomach pulling her torso forward, waddle to the bedroom and attempt to pull on pajamas with forty extra pounds resting awkwardly on her stomach. Once she finished, she would fall backwards into bed and thank God for soft mattresses, while her husband got in beside her.

"Don?"

"Yeah?" He was already almost asleep.

"I love you."

"Love you, too," he mumbled, ten seconds before beginning to snore.

Jamie smiled. She might manage a few hours of sleep, if her back, and her girls, cooperated. When she was a child, the perpetual rush of traffic outside her window had always turned into a chorus of lullabies for her at night, and she had never had trouble sleeping. But once her stomach grew large enough to keep her off her feet, it kept her out of her dreams, as well; she would lie awake all night, sometimes, simply wondering at the fact that two perfect little bodies were growing inside of her, without knowing what she did to deserve such a reward. She imagined Lindsey, doing the same thing, six years ago; her mother, thirty-four years ago. She felt that kinship she had yearned for, sitting alone in her dimly-lit bathroom nine months prior – that connection with all other mothers, wondering what amazing force had given them this magic.

* * *

Jamie thinks she managed ninety minutes of sleep before the pain woke her up. It was as if something had torn in her lower abdomen – the last shred of a bachelorette's life, perhaps. She bit back the growing scream in her throat. It was only when the pain subsided, a moment later, that she realized her bed sheets were wet. Her face began to sweat, remembering her miscarriage. She flicked the lamp on, and saw that the fluid was clear.

It's not blood, she thought to herself. My water broke.

"Don," she said, her loud voice breaking the quiet of the room. The red lights of their alarm clock read 1:42.

"Hmm?"

"I think the babies are coming."

Her husband sat upright more quickly than she would have thought possible.

"We have to go to the hospital."

"Yeah," she breathes. "I got that part."

He helps her up, putting a hand behind her back to support her enormous stomach, and to the front door. Jamie managed to reach the elevator, mercifully stationed directly across the hall, as Don grabbed the duffel bag they had packed two days earlier, as Lindsey's suggestion. He threw on a coat, and then one on his wife, to protect against the freezing January cold, and then pressed the lobby button.

"This is it," he said, his eyes bright, despite the early hour.

"This is it," she repeated.


	4. Chapter 4

"What about Maria?" Cathy Lovato asked petulantly, gazing at her granddaughters.

"They already have names, Mom."

"Ella and Adah? Those names _rhyme, _Jamie. And, besides, how will they know they're Latina with names like that?"

Jamie goes off at her mother in Spanish, and Don zones out. He is still staring into the bright blue eyes of his daughter, who stares back at him as if he were a Martian.

By now, eight at night, the entire CSI team, Sam, and Jamie's three brothers and sisters-in-law had all came and left the hospital room. Cathy Lovato stubbornly waited until everyone, including her husband, had gone home, to pester her daughter about names.

Jamie's mother switches back to English. "Maria is a beautiful name. You're great aunt was named Maria, did I ever tell you that?"

"Yes."

"I think it would be a great way to honor her."

"_Mom_."

"Ma'am." A nurse had appeared in the doorway. "I'm sorry, but visiting hours are over."

"No, no, no, it's fine, I'm the grandmother."

"I'm sorry, but only parents are allowed in the infant ward after 7:30."

Cathy continues to protest as she is led out of the room, leaving Don and Jamie alone with their daughters.

Jamie held Ella in her arms, who was sound asleep while her sister examined their father. The babies were identically perfect, with ten fingers and ten toes and the tiniest beginning of translucent hair on the crowns of their small heads. One tiny hand was grasping her finger with all its might, while its owner soundly slept in its bright, loud new world.

Six pounds, four ounces each. A total of just over five kilograms, which had managed in nine short months to shake her very existence to its foundation, leaving nothing but fear and paranoia, only to rebuild a towering garden of love and amazement within her. Her hardened New York husband fell to putty holding his daughters, unable to take his eyes of them for a minute. He refused Danny's offer to go out for a celebratory drink; instead, he sat on a chair beside Jamie's bed, murmuring to Adah.

They were, as he had predicted to her a thousand times, fine. More than fine. Ecstatic.

* * *

The four – no longer a couple, now a family – had spent one night in the hospital, two, if you counted the night Jamie was in labor. As she stood in the elevator, holding one car seat while her husband held the other, Jamie felt some mix of pride and excited bubbling within her. The first of a thousand milestones in the lives of a proper family was about to occur. Ella and Adah did not seem to realize the momentousness of the occasion, their first entrance into their home; they slept soundly through it.

Once the girls were tucked safely into their cribs, Jamie and Don fell onto the couch.

"I love you," he said, kissing her temple.

"I love you, too," she said, smiling. "And I love our daughters."

Don returned her grin, and then let his head fall onto the back of the sofa. He stared without seeing at the ceiling.

"You know what I think this calls for?"

"Hmm?" she mumbled, her head buried in his shoulder.

"A glass of wine."

She looked up at him. "We don't have any, remember?"

"I had Danny drop some off last night."

She raises her eyebrows. He goes to the kitchen and returns with a bottle and two glasses, pouring some for himself and then for his wife. Jamie takes her first sip of wine in eight months, and winces.

"I forgot how bitter this stuff was."

Her husband laughs.

* * *

Jamie wakes with a start. Don is sleeping soundly next to her, as usual. The clock reads 4:19. They put the twins to bed seven hours ago, and, to her knowledge, they had yet to make a sound.

Her pulse begins to creep upward. How many times had her mother complained of the years of sleepless nights? Of the midnight strolls through the neighborhood to quite her whining newborns? How many people had warned her she wouldn't get eight hours of sleep until the kids were two, at the very earliest?

Blood is now pounding in her head, deafening any sound that may connect her to reality. She is adrift in a world of dead babies; suffocating from getting twisted in blankets, choking on their own vomit; tiny hearts giving up mere hours after they exited the womb.

She shakes her husband awake. He mumbles unintelligibly.

"Don, did they wake up?"

"What?"

"Tonight, at all? Did Ella and Adah wake up?"

"I don't think so. I don't know. What time is it?"

She leaps out of bed and rushes to the nursery. Two small forms sit in the cribs. She reaches Ella first, and holdings her hand an inch above the baby's mouth. Tiny bursts of warm up hit her hand, and she allows herself the smallest of sighs before moving to Adah. Again, air pushes up from the baby's mouth.

Relief comes like a wave, momentarily immobilizing her. She stands in the middle of the floor, eyes going from one child to the other, watching their chests rise and fall.

Don appeared in the doorway, somewhat alarmed but still not fully awake.

"What are you doing?"

"_Shhh_," she scolds before pushing him out of the room and closing the door.

"What were you doing?"

"I was just making sure they were all right."

"Was there a reason you would think otherwise?"

"They hadn't woken up all night."

He smiles sleepily. "It's too early for this," he mumbles, before shuffling back to bed.

Too agitated to sleep, Jamie goes to sit in the living room. The sun was just beginning to think about pushing up from the horizon; the slightest bit of grey light infiltrated their living room. She considered calling her mother, who would not doubt answer the phone, but decided against it; she would probably just drive over here and wake everyone up.

Alone, Jamie sits in their small living room, feet tucked under her now significantly lighter body. She imagined going to work, which she would inevitably start in a few weeks. She pictured herself getting dressed, cooking breakfast. Repeating thirty-four years' worth of mornings. But this time, she would dress two more bodies, feed two more people, drop off two gloriously wonderful children at a day-care center, and then start her day. She would no longer be a cop while she filled out forms, interrogated suspects, examined crime scenes. She would be a mom while she did these things. It was amazing how such a small word could change the way you viewed the world so completely.


	5. Chapter 5

Don marveled at how quickly his world had changed, from a protector of a city to a protector of two small lives that had now managed to all but consume his mind and heart. He woke up thinking of his children; he thought of them as he brushed his teeth, cooked breakfast, got dressed for the day. He thought of them while he examined dead bodies, called witnesses, chased down and interrogated suspects. He thought of them while he drove through traffic, while he bought coffee, while he talked about sports. There was nothing that could eclipse his daughters' uninterrupted place at the forefront of his mind. It was as if they had made everything less significant, and he could no longer think of anything but what was right in front of him, or his thoughts would stray back to the two tiny children at home, with four tiny hands and four tiny feet and four azure eyes that could captivate his attention endlessly.

So, as one would assume, he was thinking about his daughters when he went to look for a suspect at their last known address in Brooklyn. He was thinking about his daughters when he climbed up the twenty floors to apartment 243, because the elevator was broken. He was thinking about his daughters when he noticed how maze-like the old building was, and told Danny they should split up to try to find the apartment they were looking for. He was thinking about his daughters when he found the room first, called Danny, and shrugged when his partner didn't respond. He was thinking about his daughters when he knocked on the door and shouted his usual "NYPD, open up!" He was thinking about his daughters when, at least two minutes later, the door creaked open, and a quiet voice said "Come in." He was thinking about his daughters when something struck him on the back of the head, hard enough to make him fall over, and he was thinking about his daughters right up until he blacked out.

* * *

The first thing Don noticed was the pain. A searing pain commanded the whole backside of his skull with such force he feared a blood vessel had burst. Gradually, he became aware of the rest of his body: the bones of his lower back and butt pressing against a cold, hard floor; the subtle throbbing produced in his wrists by the tightly-bound piece of cloth tied over them; the dryness in his lungs from breathing the frigid air. He could not see anything, though all the nerves in his head were preoccupied with the ache from the blow, leaving his face mostly numb, so that he could not really tell whether he was blindfolded or if the room he was in was simply completely lightless. There were no sounds, no smells. Nothing but cold air burning his face and throat, and the perpetual sting in his head.

He attempted to stand. His head hit a hard surface, and – though he would have, a moment ago, said it was impossible – the pain there worsened. A grunt escaped from his chest, and he slid backwards to the ground again. Moving his feet around the edges of his container, he was able to ascertain that he was trapped in something approximately five by four by four feet. The walls, like the ceiling, seemed to be of stone, or something equally impregnable. He could not feel any holes through the thick soles of his boots, but prayed there was at least a way for the freezing air to get in and out.

During this whole self-assessment, the majority of his mind was full of his daughters. He wondered how long he had been unconscious – minutes, hours, days? Danny had almost certainly noticed his absence, and was now, if not calling to report a missing cop, then at least getting slightly suspicious. Did anyone know he had been kidnapped? Had anyone called Jamie?

Don had not seen his attacker; the apartment had been too dark. Could he still be in room 243? Had the assailant had time to bind him, move him, and then lock him in this container? What were his plans?

When Don ran out of questions that, for all the answers he had, might as well have been rhetorical, he began to work on the binding on his hands. It was well-executed; the knot appeared complicated, from what little he could feel of it, and the material was strong. His skin had broken out into a nervous sweat, though, which helped.

He thought of his daughters while he worked. He had kissed them good-bye this morning, while Jamie feed them breakfast. As was their normal routine, Don went into work early, and Jamie followed behind once the girls were ready for daycare. They were eating baby food now; Adah had mashed carrots on her forehead while Ella refused any and all pea-flavored mush. Jamie sat in her pajamas, happily ignoring the baby food one of the girls had landed in their mother's hair.

He had almost managed to get the cloth past his thumbs when the sound of stone grinding on stone assaulted his eardrums. As one wall fell away, rays of light battered his dilated pupils. He blinked at the pain. A silhouette, crouched down, appeared in Don's sight.


	6. Chapter 6

In movies, when someone gets bad news – terrible news, earth-shattering news – the audience watches as the news-receiver stops. He or she may drop a phone, should they be holding one, or freeze whatever action they were performing in the moment they are given the announcement. The audience can feel the earth literally stop and shatter around the person; background noises become softer, edges become blurrier, and nothing exists but a small insulated world of broken routines and smashed lives.

This didn't happen for Jamie. When she found out a body had shown up that matched her missing husband to a tee, she didn't drop and phone and she didn't freeze. The babies continued to cry in the next room over; cars' horns continued to protest the perturbingly slow pace of the New Yorkers they carried; she continued biting the nail she had been chewing on when Mac had called. It surprised her, really. She had always imagined her relationship with Don as somewhat of a modern-day fairytale. She knew she might not get the happily-ever-after ending everyone yearned for – perhaps Disney had run out of adequate fairy godmothers with Cinderella, and was left with only half-trained godmothers to protect the world's love stories – but at least, she thought, the world would act accordingly through whatever conclusion she was dealt.

And so she was taken aback – or, at least, the small part of her mind not racing at the thought of her husband lying, limp and cold, on a metal board in autopsy was taken aback – when her apartment seemed to continue on without pause. Her feet remained firmly planted on her kitchen floor while she listened to her boss on the other end of the phone.

"I know we were all expecting this at some level, but we can identify the body. Don't come in. Look after the twins," he was saying.

Jamie thought of the last time she had seen her husband. He had been shrugging on his suit jacket while talking to Danny about the latest Yankee's game. She was sitting at her desk, attempting to make a dent in the soul-sucking paperwork that was consuming her workspace. She had half-shouted goodbye across the room, and he had said it back, distractedly, the "e" of "bye" slurring together with the next word of his conversation.

That was not a proper end to four years of marriage. If she could no longer talk to her husband, she would at least say goodbye to her husband's body.

"I'm coming in. I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

* * *

Mac had not been exaggerating when he described the severity of Don's wounds. So bad, Sid said, they could not even identify a single cause of death. It reminded Jamie of something she had read once about lethal injection: the attending nurses each put a different chemical in the convict, which, alone, would not be deadly, but, once mixed, would lead to a quick and rather painless passing. They did this, the article said, because they did not want any one nurse to feel responsible for a murder.

Perhaps, in some twist of fate, their fairytale godmother protected Don enough that each individual injury would not have killed him. But, as Jamie had always known, fairytale godmothers can only do so much. The universe was cruel enough to find a malicious loophole: mix tortures together until Don Flack's soul could no longer hold on to his body.

The whole way to autopsy, Mac attempted to convince Jamie not to look. It's bad, he had said. Really bad. And, as previously stated, he was not exaggerating.

Don's face had been completely torn off. Each tooth had, pre-mortem, been viciously removed from its place in the gum by what once could assume was a rusty and inefficient tool. There were whip marks on his back and deep black-blue bruises on his stomach. There were third-degree burns on his feet and ankles, which Sid said appeared to have been sustained from walking through fire. His fingers had been dipped in acid to burn off prints; the only way of identifying his body had been a scar on his knee from some childhood injury.

When they lifted up the sheet, Jamie put her hand to her mouth. Something had changed in Don since the last time she had seen him; she did not know what the culprit was, death or upwards of three weeks of being a hostage. His skin seemed looser, somehow. His body no longer appeared to be a masterpiece of evolution and genetics, but a haphazard collection of too-long limbs.

Still, the world did not stop. She heard people talking outside, felt the heat of the fluorescent lamps from the ceiling. She knew that, no more than ten or twelve blocks away, her twins were stumbling through her neighbor's apartment, completely unaware that anything was wrong, other than that their mother was in a bad mood. Somewhere, Samantha Flack, who had not yet been notified, was working on the slow and tedious task of piecing her life together in recovery. Somewhere, babies were being born and old people were dying and business deals were being made and children were being taught. There were perhaps ten people among the world's seven billion that had even paused to consider Don Flack's death. No natural disasters were occurring. No people were falling to their knees in anguish or terror. The earth had not shattered. The world will not stop for one man, she thought bitterly. Even if that man saved the world from some of the worst people it had created.


	7. Chapter 7

The past week had been a blur of tears and restless sleep. The twins seemed to always be screaming at the same time, when two arms were never enough to rock two babies. Jamie had insisted Sam come over when she told her what had happened; news like this wasn't one that you wanted to receive on the phone. They had sat next to each other on Don's ratty couch, neither able to comfort the other while her own heart was crushed under the vacuum of loss. Funeral preparations did not, as Jamie hoped, provide any sort of reprieve from the emptiness. Everywhere she went, she felt lighter, somehow, less whole. Don Flack had been poured himself over her life like water, forcing her stone will to bend beneath him, so slowly she had not seen it happening; corners became less sharp, ridges were made where they were not before. And now, the water was gone, and she was left with an inexplicably scarred life.

Jamie had said goodbye to the last dark-clad somber family member, taken her daughters out of their small black dresses, and was sitting on that same goddamn couch. A book that had been open to the same page for the past hour lay in her lap. Her mind had wandered back to a few hours earlier, when she stood at the head of the large group of funeral-goers, flanked by Samantha, Mac, Jo, Lindsay, Danny, her mother. Ella and Adah, for once still and quite, had stood by her feet.

Jamie wondered if they would remember this day later, when she told stories about their father. She wondered if perhaps their only memory of him would be that large wooden box being lowered gently into the ground, of throwing dirt overtop of the final resting place of Don Flack. What would they say when she insisted on visiting his grave? For the next few years, it would probably just be another fun excursion, something to get out of the house. But once they reached the age of self-consciousness, the age of "Drop me off around the block, okay?", would they resist? Would they sit in a teenage slump on this very couch and complain of the weather, of homework, of being tired, anything to get out of going to the graveyard? Would they listen when she talked about how their father was the most amazing man she had ever met? Of how he had loved them, from the moment they were born until the moment he left them forever?

Would she remember these things?

Or would she, eventually – maybe not this week or month or year, but at some point – begin to forget? One day, would a minute go by without thinking about Don, then an hour, then half a day? Would she later struggle to bring his face to her mind, yet alone recall the way he hummed while he cooked breakfast, or played with her hair absentmindedly when they watched TV?

She imagined being a single mother. Dropping her daughters off at day care, going to work, and then picking them up. Always being the one to get up in the middle of the night when there was a nightmare, or a sudden-onset 2am attack of nausea. Always being the one to go on the field trips, the PTA meetings, the doctor's appointments and the drop-offs. Always being on the referee duty that is multi-child parenthood.

She thought of going to work every day and seeing that empty desk, or seeing someone other than her husband sitting across from her. She thought of going to bed every night on the left side of the bed, leaving his side empty. She thought of every birthday, every wedding, every party, where she would no longer have a date. She thought of their anniversary, coming like a hurricane every year, tearing her apart bit by bit, making her mood worse and worse, until March 17th was dreaded by everyone around her.

She thought of filling out forms with the marital status "single". She thought of describing herself as single. She thought of taking off her rings and letting them, like her husband, sit in a box somewhere to be forgotten about. She thought of being a pathetic, lonely fifty-year-old, and having teenage daughters push her to start dating.

A knock on the door interrupted her depression. She braced herself for the impending wails, but apparently the sound had not woken up either of her daughters. She pushed herself off the couch and walked to door, wondering if perhaps a friend had left something in her apartment after the funeral. No one else would come so late.

She opened the door to find Mac, still in his funeral suit, standing in front of Christine.

"Forget something, boss?"

He smiled slightly. "I need you to come with me."

* * *

Christine stayed in the apartment in case the children woke up. Jamie got in Mac's car, but he refused to say where they were going. She watched the bright lights of the city pass the car slowly, reading sign after sign without registering any words. The city that never sleeps. When she was little, Jamie could not understand that saying. Surely it couldn't be right. Everyone has to sleep. She remembered her father telling her that there are so many people in this city, all of whom go to bed and wake up at different times, that, at any given moment, it seems like the whole city is awake. Another responsibility left solely on her as the only parent: explain all the confusing phenomena of this never-stopping world.

They pulled up in front of New York General, and a hollow feeling grows in Jamie's stomach. She imagined having to go to another funeral before she had even washed her black dress.

"What's wrong?"

Mac just shakes his head, and leads her from the parking garage into the main lobby. They pass the empty receptionist's desk without stopping. Mac knows where he is going.

The last time she had been here was when she had Ella and Adah. She had been in a completely different wing that time, with pastel-colored walls and excited couples. Here, everything was a shade of grey. The labyrinth of corridors sucked hope from the hopeless; if they couldn't even find their way out of this maze, how would their loved ones ever leave, except in the expert hands of men who went daily from the hospital to the morgue?

They entered a set of double doors into the ICU, where the perpetual beeping created a chorus of bleak futures. Each room had a small window, giving Jamie a view into bed after bed of bodies hooked up to intimidating machines. Who, whom she loved, had landed themselves here? Why wouldn't Mac say anything?

Finally, they reached the room Mac was looking for. Room 392, the utilitarian plaque with emotionless letters above the door said. The shade was pulled down on the window, so she could not see anything. Mac pulled the door open, and motioned for her to go inside.

There were two beds. One housed a middle-aged woman with casts and bindings covering the majority of her chest and head. The other, a man with a ventilator hooked to his mouth, making his chest rise and fall in a perfect rhythm. Bruises had turned his face blackish purple, and both eyes were swollen nearly shut. He was in bad shape, but he was recognizable.

Or at least, he was recognizable to his wife.

* * *

Jamie rushed to her husband's bedside, not touching him for fear of messing up the elaborate web of tubes and bandages across his body. A nurse, whom she just noticed, was messing with one of the many machines to his right, and started to semi-politely tell her to fuck off, but Jamie did not hear.

"He's dead," she heard herself say.

The nurse impatiently said "No, he's not. See here? His heart is beating."

Jamie ignored the woman, turning to her boss, who was still in the doorway. "But…"

"I guess a lot of people tear ligaments in their knees," Mac said.

The nurse was now thoroughly confused. "His knees are not the problem."

Jamie turned to look at her. "Will he be okay?"

She was obviously unsettled. "He'll most likely be released within four, five weeks."

Jamie smiled down at her husband. No more than ten or twelve blocks away, her twins were sleeping in her apartment, completely unaware that anything was unusual, other than that their mother had been in a bad mood when they had gone to bed. Somewhere, Samantha Flack was working on the slow and tedious task of piecing her life together in recovery, made even worse by her brother's funeral. Somewhere, babies were being born and old people were dying and business deals were being made and children were being taught. And in Room 392 of New York General Hospital, a wife was convincing a tired nurse to let her spend the night with her not-dead husband.


	8. Chapter 8

As Jamie wipes the small glob of frosting from her finger – a mark from the fifth and final candle she placed on the purple cake in her kitchen a moment ago – she smiles slightly. Her first thought this morning, as she showered her daughters with birthday kisses while their father hummed Happy Birthday over the stove, where perfectly golden brown pancakes were cooking, was that she had managed to keep two girls alive through what her mother ominously called the toothpaste-eating phase.

As every parent in her family loved to say, toothpaste-eating was a Lovato tradition. Her girls had seemed to inherit a magnified version of the trait, graduating from toothpaste to chap stick, vitamins, and once, terrifyingly, her sister-in-law's antibiotics. (That ambulance ride seemed to last days, Jamie recalls, and the whole while she vacillated between being so petrified for her daughters she couldn't move, and harboring enough anger against her brother, who was supposed to be watching the girls, that she vowed to never speak to him again. She nearly collapsed with relief when she found out the antibiotics were nontoxic, even in high doses.)

The first test of motherhood, Kathy Lovato always says, was getting your children safely through the toothpaste-eating phase. That is, if one ignores the times when the woman claims the first test of motherhood is not dying from sleep deprivation the first few months. Of course, Ella and Adah had, inexplicably, slept through the night since they were one day old, so Jamie had nearly completely managed to avoid the challenge of fatigue so extreme you could forget your own name.

Jamie's second thought that morning, after relishing her survival of the toothpaste-eating phase, the potty-training phase, the inexplicable-crying phase – if a mother was ever done with that – was that she was coming closer to the end of the spontaneous-dancing phase, the lack-of-self-consciousness phase, the falling-asleep-in-you-lap phase.

She was aware that, with every birthday that passed, her children would begin to need her less and less. It had become evident with the passing of the need-to-be-propped-up-on-side-at-night-or-might-choke-on-own-vomit stage, the must-support-the-head stage, the cannot-hold-own-bottle stage. All good things must come to an end, as they say – _that _had become clear when she all but gave up pleasure reading at the birth of her children – but, as the mysterious being or group of beings that seems to play such a prominent role in our lives, considering we cannot name them other than "they", also say, as one door closes, another opens. And, like many mothers before her, Jamie had to accept that more independence in her children would lead to more worry in her, and that was just how life had to be; mothers must watch their children play soccer while simultaneously praying against broken ankles, send them off to school and keep fingers crossed they don't meet any lunch-money-hungry bullies during the day.

Now, as she finished lighting the six candles on her daughters' birthday cake, Jamie recalled the past four birthdays. One, with Daddy still in a wheelchair and mostly hyped on pain medication, leading to the majority of the photos he took being blurry. Two, with cousins and friends from daycare leading to an evening so exciting everyone under the age of ten left in a sugar coma. Three, with Aunt Sam, wielding skills from her new, alcohol-free job at a local salon, doing both girl's hair in a way that was too elaborate to last more than ten minutes after they got up, but thrilling enough to ward off any tantrums for the whole party. Four, halfway through the last year of preschool, and the beginning of the talk of "big-girl" activities like ice skating and horse-back riding which made Jamie's heart skip a couple beats. And finally five, two months into ice skating lessons without incident, and a promise from a stable on Long Island that the girls could start riding – with the most protective helmets, of course – when they were five and a half.

She was determined not to develop her mother's attitude – tempting though it may be – of looking at her girls' childhood as a series of ever-worsening stages to survive. Not only would that put a cloud over the future dark enough to convince her to become a Durex sales correspondent, but it would blind her to the ever-brightening stages of growing up. Two of those being, for her girls, at least, ice-skating-stage and horse-back-riding stage, both of which were part of the biggest stage of all: the not-needing-your-parents-anymore stage.

These were the stages her mother didn't warn her about.

And however terrifying they were, right now Ella and Adah were still in the belly of the hanging-out-with-my-family-is-the-best-thing-ever phase, which coincided with the Mommy-needs-to-light-the-candles-because-fire-is-dangerous phase, both of which Jamie planned to relish in for at least a few more years. So when she walked out of her kitchen to the living room, where a card table had become the makeshift location for a birthday dinner, Dora the Explorer cake in hand, she sang the loudest for her two little girls, and the looks on their faces, showing there was nowhere on this Earth they'd rather be than surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins, was enough.


	9. Chapter 9

"Daddy, when can we go to the library?" Ella asked in a voice that was flirting with whine status.

"Honey, we just went two days ago."

"We already finished those books, Daddy," Adah says, as if it was idiotic to even consider otherwise. "We need more."

Don leaned back on the couch, only one of his sneakers untied. At the moment, it was difficult to consider going out again, having just come back from a run that had left his entire shirt soaked with sweat. Really, it was hard to consider anything but a freezing cold shower.

"Maybe once I've showered, girls."

"_Maybe_?"

It was times like these where Don cursed the fact that his daughter's had not only inherited some exaggerated version of his wife's love of reading, but also her permanent attitude. He pauses, considering his words carefully. Should _definitely_, or anything remotely in that category, pass his lips, he would be forced to go to the library, under threat of hours of loud and petulant protest from his kids.

"I will really try my best to make time to take you two to the library today, okay?"

At this, they seem satisfied, and go back to drawing.

Much to Don's surprise, neither Ella nor Adah had much of any interest in TV. Whenever he watched it, they climbed into his lap and whined about being bored and wanting to do something else. They had never once asked to watch it, only inquired as to what on Earth made it so appealing to their parents. This was a blessing and a curse. On one hand, he never struggled with the problems Danny unendingly complained about related to the form of entertainment – fights over whose turn it is to pick what to watch, the desire to spend hours in front of mind-numbing shows, worries that too much television would melt the kids' brains. On the other, there was no constant activity to fall back on. The world of two seven-year-olds was ripe with want of a simple source of amusement for the plethora of times that Mommy and Daddy were busy – cooking, showering, on the phone, washing clothes, cleaning up.

Of course, both girls could sit, with an ample supply of books, and read for hours without speaking once. The problem was that "an ample supply of books" meant just about an endless reserve. And for parenthood standards as high as Jamie's (healthy, home cooked meals every night, a spotless house that minimized things on which to choke, bruise, or trip) mixed with a desire to shower and wear clean clothes every day, sometimes Don felt the only solution was to move into the city library.

At that moment, Jamie appeared, hair wet from a recent shower. "Girls, come on. I'll take you to the library while Daddy showers, how about that?"

Eager squeals from the twins follow, and a feeling of relief washes over Don. He was now but minutes away from no longer being covered in sweat.

The girls do not have to wait to be told to get ready. They race around, finding socks and shoes and the library books from their last visit. Don watches them from his perch on the ratty couch, in awe, as usual, as to what God blessed him with such perfect children.

_Identically_ perfect, he always said. Because the girls were, in nearly every way, completely identical. No one, excluding himself and his wife, could tell them apart. Both had short bodies, thin in the extreme, despite the food they shoveled back at every meal. Both had unimaginably cute faces framed by the thickest, curliest of brown hair, which they insisted on keeping long – so long, now, they nearly sat on it. They liked and disliked the same foods, books, activities. They both existed in a constant state of motion, from the long list of sports they played in the span of a week, to the squirming every time they were forced to sit, to the way they fiddled with their hair as they read. They were, to say the least, a handful, but they were the kind of handful that you could not help but enjoy nurturing and lifting up, feeling as though, in the process of helping them, you were touched by some sort of magic.

They were equally matched at everything. If they read two books of similar lengths, they finished at the exact same time. If they started with the same amount of food, they declared themselves full in unison, leaving the exact same quantity and types of foods on their plates. What one found sad, the other found sad. What one found funny, the other found funny. They were ticklish in all the same places, enjoyed wearing the same types of clothes. They were best friends.

The pair now stood by the door, shoes tied, books in hand, waiting for their mother to strap on her sandals. Don smiled at their identical expressions of impatience, which erupted into uncontained annoyance when his wife could not find the car keys.

"We can _walk_, Mommy," Ella said.

"Sweetie, it's twelve blocks from here," Jamie replied as she lifted up the loaf of bread on the counter. "Now I had them when I came back from the drugstore…"

Realizing the keys were on the critical path to more books, the girls both, in the same instant, mobilized into a two-person search party, leaving – literally – no stone unturned in the apartment. It took about three more minutes of tearing the place apart to find the guilty keys, which had somehow managed to fall behind the dresser in the bedroom.

Once the sounds of his family had died down, the door closed and the three girls in the elevator, Don took a deep breath. He felt as he always felt when they left, slightly relieved, slightly tired, and very empty. Sometimes it was a good empty, as it was now, with the knowledge that he might be able to manage a thirty minute shower without interruption. Other times, like when he left for work, it seemed as if the emptiness has created a vacuum inside of him that would continue to grow until he got back to his daughters.

Some infinites are bigger than other infinities, as Riemann said. And some handfuls are more filling than other handfuls.


	10. Chapter 10

Twenty-five hours a week was a lot. Anyone could tell you that. Most third graders don't even spend an hour a day on sports. This new team amounted to just over six hours daily. That, on top of school and just about every sport under the sun, and it seemed crazy to even consider letting Ella and Adah spending twenty-five hours a week on anything.

But, when the girls had been showered with what was normally infrequent praise from their gymnastics coach, they had been adamant: we want to join the Advanced Junior Team.

And that is how Jamie came to be standing in a freezing cold gym at ten at night, watching her exhausted eight-year-olds do _one more routine _on the balance beam (despite the fact that practice officially ended nearly an hour ago) musing over the fact that, two months ago, twenty-five hours a week had seemed like much less.

Six hours a day, four days a week. That's not that bad, she had though. She had tried to convince herself that Ella and Adah would enjoy it. They had always loved gymnastics. And there was some sort of scholarship worked out with the gym (her girls are _that _good, Jamie remembers thinking when she had heard), so it really wasn't that much extra money. Plus, all the time spent on gymnastics had cut out soccer, swimming and tennis from the schedule, so, all told, the Flacks came out almost on top with the switch, moneywise. Gymnastics was a healthy form of entertainment; it was basically a hundred percent working out, and what American didn't need 25 hours of exercise a week? It would teach the girls a strong work ethic.

What could be the downside?

The down_sides_, it turns out, were plentiful. One, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the girls didn't get home until ten at the earliest, and on Saturdays, they were gone from noon until dinner time. Two, on those days, what little time they did have at home was spent in a state of overexertion-induced stupor. Three, Jamie and Don were almost never available to do the school-to-gym ride, and they had to call upon either another gymnast's mother or Sam to cart the girls on the trip. Four, Coach was basically a professional buzz-kill, and it was easier to get a straight answer out of a Shakespearian character than to get a compliment out of her. Five, the constant exercise turned out to include a nearly one hundred percent risk that the girls would, at some point, injure themselves, at least according to the other moms. Jamie did not know how her daughters managed to stay upbeat, spending so much time around the loudly critical lady and eternally injured gymnasts.

Right now, said daughters were on two balance beams, directly across from each other, performing the same sequence of skills in perfect unison. Every time their feet left the hard wooden pole, Jamie's heart leapt to her throat. But each time, the girls' feet, timed together perfectly, fell in the exact center of the beam, and Jamie's heart could return to its normal place in the upper left of her chest, at least until the next jump.

To a mother's biased and untrained eye, the routine seemed perfect. No one fell, no one got hurt, and, to Jamie – by now a master of Neosporin and water-proof band-aids – that meant it was a good day. Coach had very different standards.

"Point your toes, Ella! I've told you this a thousand times."

Hadn't she been pointing her toes just then?

"Adah, you need to at least act like you know what you're doing!"

Did she not look completely comfortable for someone on a four inch wide beam?

"Girls, neither of those whatever you just did were a sheep jump!"

Coach's grammar had never been the best.

Finally, three _one more routine_s later, Coach dismissed the girls. They seemed cheerful, and, even though they were sore and tired and acutely aware of the need to leave the house at six thirty the next morning, they nearly bounced to the locker room to pull on some outerwear for the ride home.

"How'd it go today?" Jamie asked Coach, almost scared to hear what she had to say.

"They think they can get by with their natural ability. It's true that they look better than most of the other girls, even if they're technique can't hold water, but that won't last forever – certainly not once they start competing in interstate competitions."

"Interstate competitions?" Weren't the three, four hour drives upstate enough?

"First one of the season is next weekend. It's in Vermont. I'm expecting gyms from all over New England, so your girls are going to have to start _pointing their feet_, hear me?"

Jamie can only nod, thankful that her daughters are finished changing. They all politely thank the woman before leaving.

The walk to the car is chilly, and Jamie sees Ella and Adah both, in the same instant, tuck their arms into their armpits and put their heads down. She smiles, despite the cold.

Once into the warmth of the car, seatbelts buckled, Jamie begins to start the usual questions about her children's day, but only half-heartedly. She was thinking about how she would ever be able to make it to a competition that was nearly in Canada when she couldn't find time make the thirty minute drive to her daughters' gym.

"How was school?"

"Good."

"Did you learn anything new?"

"Clouds are just water and you can't live on them."

She looked in the rearview mirror. Both girls were nodding off, heads resting on the sides of their backed booster seats. Jamie does some quick mental rearranging of Coach's comments in her head.

"Coach said that you guys have really good natural ability. Do you know what that means?"

A slight nod from Adah, nothing from Ella. Jamie turns her eyes back to the road, which has become a meditative blur of yellow and white on a black background. She focuses all of the little energy she had left on staying awake for the next twenty minutes, until she can fall into bed. She envisions her husband, who had probably elected to go to sleep, knowing both his daughters would most likely be adrift in a land of (hopefully) balance-beam-free dreams by the time they get home. Even splitting this drive with him, only having to do it twice a week, was enough to make Jamie regret having agreed to put her daughters on the elite team.

She reaches their apartment building without even realizing she had gotten off the highway. It is this kind of driving that makes her nervous – this mindless control of a vehicle, surrounded by many others of the same kind, that was capable of killing everyone inside of and around it. She tried not to think of all the accidents she had seen, all the dead bodies that had been pulled out of destroyed cars while she watched.

Jamie wakes her sleeping daughters just enough so that they can stumble to the elevator, and then into the apartment. She is pleasantly surprised when she finds her husband, awake, if barely, sitting in the living room. He assists with the Herculean task of getting two exhausted eight-year-olds to switch their skin-tight leotards for loose cotton pajamas, brush their teeth, and into bed.

By the time Jamie had put on her own sleeping attire, a baggy tee shirt and sweatpants, and brushed a day's worth of fast food and polluted city air off her teeth, it is all she can do to drag herself down the hallway and onto her warm mattress. Once Don turns out the light, the only thing her eyes can make out are the small red numbers on her digital clock: 11:37. She has to be out the door in less than seven hours. She groans.

Her husband slides closer to her in bed, encircling her in his warm arms. "Long day?"

Jamie can barely remember arriving at the gym at eight o'clock, let alone her work day. She vaguely recalls interrogating a suspect who kept making snide remarks about her lack of a penis, so mumbles an affirmative sound.

Don kisses the back of her neck, and she twists toward him. "Why do we do this?"

"Do what?" he says, between pecks.

"Why do we send Ella and Adah to that God-awful woman every week?"

He pauses his show of affection, attempting to work the question through his brain, currently fogged with sleep deprivation.

"They like it, remember?"

"Do they, though? It just seems so…" She searches for the right word, unable to find it at such a late hour, and settles for "tiring. I was talking to Clara today, and she said Nicole has broken bones three times because of gymnastics. Can you imagine? Three trips to the hospital."

This seemed to strike a chord within her husband, as she knew it would. As a police officer, there wasn't much in the world that you desired less than taking your children to the hospital. To a cop, hospitals were the homes of the rape victims and the dying.

"We'll talk with them tomorrow, after dinner, okay? If they don't like it, we can stop."

Jamie nods, and is just falling asleep when she hears her husband begin to snore. Nearly twelve years of marriage, and she doesn't think she has once fallen asleep before him.

* * *

_"__I think you might want to consider singing Ella and Adah up to be on the Advanced Junior Team."_

_ "__Advanced Junior Team," Jamie repeats. Her daughters' gymnastic coach seemed different on the phone, more subdued. Jamie was accustomed to hearing the woman screaming insults, thinly veiled as constructive criticism, across a high ceilinged gym._

_ "__Yes. They have shown incredible natural abilities, and I think the regime offered by the Advanced Team is what they need to truly prosper."_

_ "__What does this regime entail?"_

_ "__We meet three days a week, plus conditioning on Saturdays. There are extra fees, of course, for the increase in gym time-"_

_ "__Four days a week?"_

_ "__Four days, including conditioning, yes. A total of maybe twenty-five hours per week."_

_ "__That's ridiculous. That's a part-time job."_

_ "__If you want to truly become a gymnast, you have to put in the hours," the woman said, as if it was a waste of her time to talk to anyone who held a different opinion._

_ "__My daughters aren't even eight yet, Coach." The fanatical woman insisted on being called that, even by the parents. Don joked that she forced her husband to use it in bed, as well._

_ "__Most serious gymnasts start at five or six, at the latest. We're on borrowed time here as it is, Jamie."_

_ "__I really don't think twenty-five hours a week is a commitment I want to make for my children right now."_

_ "__Think about it. Talk it over with Don and the girls. Sleep on it. Call me in a few days, okay? I'm telling you, you're sitting on a gold mine here."_

_Coach ended the call before Jami could object to her children being called a gold mine._

* * *

What about now? Jamie wondered. Is a gold mine still a gold mine if it will not point its feet?


	11. Chapter 11

**Thanks to everyone who has read this far into this fic! I'm on summer break now, so hopefully I'll be updating often. Please review! It makes my day whenever I see new reviews. (Criticism/advice welcome!) Hope everyone who has finals is surviving finals! **

* * *

Don had, in his time as a cop, watched the process of losing a loved one more times than he cared to mention. He had, too often, been the one to make the call for which the mothers of trouble-makers waited in fear, unable to sleep. He had seen the frantic parents, the hysterical siblings and spouses, the masses of tear-stained cheeks. He had observed grief tear work its way through families and tear them apart.

Outside of this process, looking in, you can claim to sympathize, if not completely appreciate, what heartache like this does to a person. You can claim to know how difficult it is to move on once a loved one is lost. You can make your own opinions about the worst forms of grief, the worst ways to lose someone you love.

But you will always be wrong. If you have never lost someone whom you truly love more than yourself – which is a rare phenomenon this world, but present all the same – then you can claim no hint of understanding of grief. You will not be able to describe, in detail, how the heart wrenches right before it shatters. You will not realize the sort of all-consuming rage that builds within you when someone says y_ou have my deepest sympathies_, as if that were any consolation at all, nor the power of will it takes to swallow your anger and thank the sympathizers. You will not know that the mental pain accompanied with death is cancerous, that it will spread from your mind to your body and leave you with aches in your shoulders, your back, your legs. You cannot know how difficult, utterly impossible, some days, it will be to pull yourself out of bed in the morning, let alone drag the huddled mass of disparagement and defeat you have become to work. Until your small little utopia of too much gymnastics and not enough books is shattered by the cold blade of loss, you will never understand.

On Wednesdays, Sam drove Ella and Adah from school to gymnastics practice, because her shift at the salon ended at noon. At 2:45 she picked the girls up on 28th street and began the drive over to Long Island. At 3:15, assuming traffic wasn't too unbearable, she pulled into the gymnasium parking lot and dropped of her nieces, watching to make sure they got safely into the building before driving home.

On this particular Wednesday, Adah had to stay after school to work on a science project for which, much to both girls' chagrin, she was not paired with Ella. And so, after she had dealt with the screaming of Coach McDonald about Adah missing practice, Jamie had called Sam this morning and told her that only Ella would need to be taken to gymnastics today.

At 2:57 Don Flack answered his cell phone. He did not check the Caller ID, because he was in the middle of giving Mac a summary of a crime scene, and did not want to waste any precious seconds. Had he checked the name on the screen, he would have seen the call from his sister, and immediately began wondering what had happened. Bloody nose? Too tired for practice?

But he was not his wife, with a tendency to worry engraved into her psyche, so, even if he had seen his sister's picture before he answered her call, he would not have expected what she had to say.

"Don." Sam's voice was high, as if she had been crying. She sounded breathless.

"Sam, what's wrong?"

"I'm at the school. Ella's not here. They said she never showed up this morning."

Don's mind shot back to earlier that day, when he watched both his daughters bounce from his car, weighed down only slightly by their bright blue backpacks, and disappear into the school building.

"That's not possible, Sam. I dropped them off. I saw them go in."

"They say Ella was absent today. She's not here, Don."

"Where's Adah?"

"I'm right next to her, she's fine, but Ella-"

"Put her on the phone."

There is a brief interlude of shuffling sounds on the other line, and then a scared voice comes on.

"Daddy?"

"Adah, are you okay?"

"Daddy, where's Ella?"

"That's what I need to ask you, sweetie. You walked into school together this morning, do you remember that?"

A pause. Don saw his daughter thinking as hard as she could, making sure she did, in fact, remember the walk to school this morning – mundane at the time, but now it seemed that her sister's life depended on the recall.

"Yes."

"Did you see her go to her classroom?"

"My classroom is closer than hers, Daddy. I went into my classroom and she kept going."

"So you didn't see her go to class?"

"Daddy, what happened to her?" The girl sounds close to tears. He imagined her hugging her aunt's cell phone to her eye, tiny knees shaking.

"It's okay, sweetie. Ella is going to be fine. Stay with your Aunt Sam, okay?"

His sister came back. "Don, what are we going to do?"

"Stay with Adah, Sam. Keep an eye on her. I'm coming over there, okay? It's fine. It will all be fine."

Don looks towards the sky, praying to any God that would listen, trying to push out the all-too-plentiful images in his head of kidnapped children. He tries to ignore the statistics (an average child is kept alive for four hours after being taken) and attempts to stop doing math in his head (Ella had been gone for six). He could swear he could write a book on exactly how his heart was twisting inside of him, threatening to fall to pieces within his chest.


	12. Chapter 12

In four minutes Don and Mac were at the school building. The hallways were mostly cleared by now, all the buses having left, but a few stragglers still walked through the lobby. Don led his boss to the main office, where he found his sister and daughter huddled together on one of the couches obviously placed there with the idea of holding much less panic-stricken individuals.

Adah jumped up when she saw her father. Her eyes were swollen with tears.

"Daddy!"

Her bony limbs clung to him as he lifted her up. He felt the smallest grain of relief, a single fish of security in an ocean of terror, at seeing that one of his daughters was safe. With Adah's head buried in his chest, his jacket thick enough that he could not feel the warm wetness of her tears, he could almost imagine that none of this was happening, that Ella was safe somewhere with his wife, and he could go home and eat dinner and listen to complaints about the long hours of gymnastics and the lack of books in the apartment.

Mac's authoritative interrogation of the school principal broke Don's reverie.

"Where did Ella go?"

"I don't know, she never reported for homeroom this morning."

"You didn't think to as her sister why she wasn't here?"

"Detective, there are nearly six hundred students at this school. People are absent all the time, for all sorts of reasons."

The principal – "pal", not "ple", because he's your _pal_ – was nothing more than an overly-educated, underpaid bureaucrat. His cheap suits probably came from a store similar to Don's favorite men's formalwear supplier, but at least the detective bothered to get a size that fit. Both men were civil servants, but of a very different kind, as was evident with the calculating look in the principal's eye. While Don's mind was quickly compiling a list of resources to find missing children, the principal was thinking over maximum negligence-protection procedure. He was not considering how to locate Ella, how to maximize the probability that the police will get to her before someone decided to kill her. He was considering how to get the Hell out of this possibly career-endangering situation. Bile rose in Don's throat.

"This morning I watched my daughter walk into this school building," Don said, his voice somehow sounding level-headed despite the terror eating away hope in the pit of his stomach. "Once her feet crossed those doors" – he motions with his head, his hands currently full – "her safety became your responsibility. You better pray to God that she is okay."

* * *

As age decreases, the ability to be tracked becomes exponentially smaller. Ella had no car to be BOLOed, no cell phone to triangulate. There were no assets to freeze or driver licenses or passports to blacklist. One could only assume she was traveling, by force, with an unknown adult – that is, if she was still alive.

Words Don did not want to think. He had refused to let Adah out of his sight since reaching the school; she was now sitting in a big-girl chair in the precinct, feet not touching the ground, unable to be comforted by the uniform sitting next to her. Jamie was in full-on frenzy, calling any and all friends, classmates, neighbors who may have some information on Ella. No one had heard a thing. There were no surveillance cameras in the school, and not a single person they had contacted who was in the building that morning remembered seeing Ella at all, other than her sister. Adah had been questioned down to a puddle of tears, and she knew nothing, other than that her sister had made it past Room Three that morning, and had kept walking.

The whole school building, past Room Three, had been deemed a crime scene and sectioned off with ominous yellow tape. Techs had spent hours combing the area, but it was obviously useless; hundreds of feet had trampled anything that a single student or her kidnapper could have possibly left behind. In the morning, the doors are not locked, so anyone could have entered or exited the building at will.

It had been almost twelve hours since Ella had disappeared, and no ransom demand had been made. Her picture was in every police department, airport, train station and hospital in the state. Everyone within a hundred mile radius who wore a badge was on the lookout for a short, skinny girl with long brown hair. They had gone through case after case, looking for a similar MO, but they had so little to go off of, it was useless.

In summary, there was nothing they could do.

An entire precinct was sitting, twiddling their thumbs, having exhausted every resource to find this child. Don was pacing quickly up and down the floor space surrounding his desk, afraid to sit still, lest the anxiety consume him. Danny tried to calm him down, without success. No, he was not hungry. No, he was not tired. No, he would not go home.

Don could not stop thinking about his own kidnapping. Waking up in a small room, wondering whether or not anyone was even looking for him. Being dragged out by his feet into a room with lights so bright he thought he had died. Finding himself wishing that he had, an hour later, covered in his own blood and vomit, being continually beaten for information he did not possess.

In all the should-we-or-shouldn't-we pre-child argument, his main point had been the dread of leaving his kids fatherless. As any cop will tell you, it isn't hard to die when working this job. Don did not want his children to stand in too-dark clothes, not really understanding – or, even worse, fully grasping – that their mother was receiving a carefully folded flag in return for a husband. (And, ironically enough, that had already happened.)

But never once had he considered his children leaving him. He had never thought about standing at the head of a sea of black, watching a small coffin being lowered into the ground. He had never mused over that certain statistic – most marriages end within a year of the death of a child. He'd never thought of dissolving a college fund, spreading the meager amount out for other pursuits. Never imagined that an identical twin could become the string on a stick of TNT, and just a glimpse of that curly brown hair could be enough to be blasted into the horrifying land of what-ifs.

And yet here he was, accepting that there was nothing he could do but pray that whatever monster had his child wasn't stupid enough to kill a cop's kid.


	13. Chapter 13

There are days when Mommy doesn't even get out of bed. These are the worst days, I think, the days where the butterflies climb up through my body and make me shiver. They start in my stomach, low down, where I have bruises from hitting the bars so many times during my routine, but after a few minutes they're everywhere. (I don't know why Daddy calls them butterflies. They should be called wasps, because they don't feel light and pretty like butterflies and they kind of hurt.)

On these days, when Daddy isn't watching me – which doesn't happen very often, now – I stand by the crack in between the door and wall and watch Mommy lie in bed. I can't see her face, only her hair over the covers. Her hair looks like Ella's and mine, except ours is curlier than hers. Her hair makes me think of Ella. I think maybe Mommy is hiding from the bad man who took Ella. Even though I know the covers don't protect me, I still hide from bad men underneath them sometimes, like Mommy.

That's the worst part. Mommy isn't supposed to be scared of anyone, because her work is to make sure bad men can't do bad things, and to not be scared by them. And if Mommy is scared of the bad man who took Ella, then he must be a very, very bad man. And if he is so bad that Mommy is scared of him, that means she cannot stop him, and cannot find Ella, and if Mommy can't do that, who can?

On these days, when Mommy is busy hiding from bad men – which is a full-time job, if you know about all the bad men Mommy and Daddy do – Daddy wakes me up. The first thing I do every morning is look over to Ella's bed. I know it's silly, but every morning I think a little bit that maybe she'll be laying there. She never is.

I miss Ella. Maybe that is the worst part, even worse than Mommy being scared. Yeah, I'm sure now. Missing Ella is the worst part. No one knows where she is, not even Mommy and Daddy, and they're always supposed to know where we are. I am so lonely now. There is no one to talk to, ever. Mommy is always so quiet, and I'm so scared because sometimes if I talk to her she starts crying, and I don't want Mommy to cry. Crying Mommy is even worse than laying-in bed-all-day Mommy, I think. Crying Mommy is the worst.

Maybe not worse than missing Ella, though. I don't think anything can be worse than missing Ella. I wake up and she's not in her bed. I eat breakfast and she's not in her chair. We go to school and she's not in her car seat. We go to the gym and Coach is only yelling at me. All of Ella's stuff is right where it was the last time I saw her. Her toothbrush and her favorite cup and Bunny. (Bunny is her best toy. Aunt Sam gave it to her when she was just born. Aunt Sam gave me Elephant when she gave Ella Bunny. I've always liked Bunny better, but I can't tell anyone, because that would be rude. But I don't think it would be rude to say I like Elephant better, which is not true anyway, so I don't say it. I don't really understand rude yet. Mommy said it's a big girl thing.)

I think about Ella a lot. I wonder what she is doing. I hope she is somewhere where it isn't too hot and she can eat a lot of peaches. (Peaches are our favorite, even better than birthday cake and ice cream.) Mommy and Daddy don't talk about her a lot anymore, which I don't like, because it's like when Daddy's Grandma died, and they talked about her every day for a while, and then less and less until now, when they don't talk about her hardly at all, and so maybe people stop talking about someone when they die, and Ella can't be dead. But for some reason Mommy and Daddy don't talk about Ella, and whenever I talk about her someone cries, including me sometimes, no matter how hard I try not to. Coach talks about Ella sometimes, but she only says that Ella will fall behind in class if someone doesn't find her soon. She told Daddy that, once, and Daddy said something to her using really big words that I couldn't understand, but he sounded very mad. Even madder than when Ella and I accidently broke the glass bird he said came from his Mommy, and he was really, really mad then, even though it was an accident.

I try my very best not to think about Ella with a bad man, a man who was so bad he makes Mommy scared and hide under the covers. Whenever I think about Ella, I think that she is probably with some family who is really confused and thinks Ella is their daughter. And I think Ella doesn't want to be rude, so she won't tell them that actually she isn't their daughter. (Ella doesn't really understand rude, either.) And whenever I think that maybe this is what happened to Ella, I want to yell at her that her real Mommy and Daddy (and sister!) miss her so much and would she please just not worry about being rude just this once so that she can come home?

But I don't know where Ella is, so I can't yell this at her. Hopefully, she'll realize this soon, though. Because Daddy looks really tired when he takes me to school and then home from the gym, sometimes so tired we don't even have food that he makes but we go out to a restaurant, which I used to like but now just makes me sad, because Ella liked going to restaurants too, and she's not with us. Even at restaurants, Daddy is so tired, underneath his eyes are all purple, like a bruise. I don't like it when Daddy is so tired, because then he gets really angry, even when I only do something that's not that bad, like yesterday when I spilled a juice box in his car and he got so angry his face got all red and I got scared. I think he would be less angry and tired if Mommy didn't sleep so much, and maybe once in a while she woke me up in the morning and took me to school, like before. Maybe Daddy doesn't know that Mommy isn't really sleeping, but just hiding from the bad man who took Ella. I would tell him, but he gets so angry now, because he is so tired.

I just want everyone to be happy again.


	14. Chapter 14

Just about everyone has given up. No one says it, of course – who's going to tell a guy that his daughter is most likely dead and that the state won't waste any more of its meager budget on trying to find what's left of her? – but Don can feel it when he walks into work in the morning. Weary detectives glance over him, seeing nothing but purple bags beneath the eyes and wrinkled suits that may never again be ironed, and then turn back to their computers. Any and all mention of children while Don is even conceivably within earshot has somehow become taboo, though Don cannot say when exactly this happened. The kid cases, equally inexplicably, seem to magically skip over his radio, disappear from his desk.

Jamie has not come to work since Mac convinced her to go home on that first night, somewhere around two in the morning. At that moment it had seemed that Jamie needed to be in the precinct like she needed air to breathe, that the only thing keeping her sane among the turmoil that her life had just become was the constant movement of police officers, the near army of people all completely invested in finding Ella.

But since then, she would not come to work. For a while, it was because she would not dare to let Adah out of her sight – she would even stand by the door when the girl had to pee, listening to make sure no kidnappers materialized in the windowless bathroom of their apartment. However, this paranoia faded over the days that followed, still without word or hope of word about Ella, eventually turning into an apathy so intense as to seem to slowly crush Jamie beneath it. Surely no one could survive, without expressing any emotion, for more than a few days at a time?

But Jamie has managed to keep up this for over three weeks now, without showing signs of stopping. It is all Don can do to shove a few bites of few down her throat each day as he watches her become skinnier and skinnier, her clothes beginning to hang off of her. Yesterday he noticed how pronounced her collarbones had become, how this, coupled with a pale face and that damned look of complete indifference, made her appear physically ill, dying. He wondered if maybe she was.

Don stares at the one daughter of which he knows the location. She is sitting at the dining room table – now looking mostly empty, missing half its normal diners – and playing with her dinner. Her hair has become a permanently untamable mane; in spite of his best efforts, Dons' hands refuse to create the tight braids his wife can produce so masterfully. In one of the few displays of preference in the past three weeks, Jamie has adamantly not allowed Adah to go to gymnastics since he, perhaps without the best judgment, told his wife of Coach's insensitive comments about their other daughter. Now the poor child, without playmate or pastime, putters around the apartment, no longer feeling entitled to complain about the sparse reading material her home has to offer. She's going on ten days without a trip to the library, but she devotedly has not said a word.

"Adah, honey, you have to eat," he says gently. She's pushing her Kraft Mac-n-Cheese around with her big girl fork – what a milestone that was, putting the pink and purple kiddie cutlery away – looking completely disinterested in the meal that, a month ago, would not have been allowed to so much as cross the Flack threshold.

"M'not hungry."

"Come on, Adah. A couple more bites, and then you can leave."

"A couple?"

"Five."

She looks at him for a moment, and then puts three or four noodles into her mouth.

"That wasn't a bite, Adah."

In a silent protest, she shovels so much pasta onto her fork that half of it falls before it reaches her lips.

"Adah."

Her small eyes meet his, and he is again reminded of how similar she looks to her sister, how they both resemble their mother in their unbending resolve.

"I want to go back to gymnastics, Daddy," she says softly.

"I know, sweetie. But you can't right now."

"Why not?"

Don could not find the right words to explain this to his daughter. That Coach had been rude would not suffice, even it were the truth, which it was not, really. An eight-year-old, bored out of her mind and becoming more terrified of her parents every day, would not understand insensitive, impolite, offensive. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Jamie had taught the girls that.

But now Jamie was wasting away in the next room over, and his daughter was sitting in front of him, refusing his unhealthy food and his poor explanations.

"I'll eat five more bites if you tell me why I can't go to gymnastics."

The phrase _we don't negotiate with terrorists_ comes to mind, and Don internally kicks himself for associating suicide bombers with his elementary school student.

"I don't know, sweetie. It's just one of those things."

Adah narrows her eyes. _One of those things_. It was Don's cop-out, his explanation for the inexplicable. Why does Daddy's Daddy not come visit more often? Why does the wine that Mommy and Daddy drink make Aunt Sam sick? Why did a bad man take Ella?

The girl pushes herself up from her chair and walks toward her bedroom. Don is about to call after her when he hears her turn, away from her room and towards his. He follows silently.

He watches from the doorway and his daughter climbs into his bed, sitting next to his wife, who has the comforter pulled up to her chin.

"Mommy," Adah says.

Jamie jerks slightly, eyes opening and searching around the room until they find the girl.

"Adah," she breathes.

"Mommy, I want to go back to gymnastics."

Don waits for some terrible reaction, screaming, crying, both. The emotion of the past month had been stored in his wife, brewing like some terrible storm, waiting for just this occasion to scare their daughter into permanent silence. She sits up slightly, her face looking pale and gaunt as usual, something he cannot grasp behind her eyes.

Jamie hugs Adah to her chest, and murmurs into her hair "Tomorrow."

* * *

Don is pulled from his restless sleep – why is it that one always seems to be sleeping most peacefully right before they must get up? – by the blaring alarm. It takes a moment for the red numbers to register in his foggy brain. He must have pressed the snooze button a few times without realizing it; he normally gets ups twenty minutes earlier.

As he rolls out of bed, he realizes his wife isn't in the room. Not an everyday occurrence, but not that unusual. Even the mortally depressed must use the bathroom.

But when he gets to the kitchen, he sees Adah sitting down, dressed, hair restrained into one of those elusive French braids, already knee-deep in the kind of well-planned, nutritious, _before _breakfast that he hadn't found time to make in nearly a month.

"Morning, Daddy," Adah chirps. She is wearing the customary en route to gymnastics uniform, a track suit, presumably over a sparkly leotard.

"Adah, I-" He stops when he sees his wife, not in pajamas for the first time in weeks, hopping into a pair of sneakers. Her skin seems to have a transforming new color, bringing a renewed look of life into her face.

"Morning," she said breathlessly. "Adah, we have to leave in ten minutes, okay?"

The girl jumps up, barely pausing to drop her still half-full dish in the sink on her way to put on her shoes.

"Jamie – what – how-" Don finds himself unable start a proper question.

His wife smiles. "It's just one of those things."


	15. Chapter 15

The ringtone of the apartment phone, Jamie has always thought, sounds a bit like a dying cat. It's a cliché thing to think, of course. Any vaguely unpleasant noise could be likened to a dying cat by the unimaginative people of modern times, whether or not the noise at all resembles a feline on the tail end of its ninth and final life. But, for Jamie, the apartment phone truly does bring back the bitter memory of the beloved Oreo Lovato sitting under her bed, howling from the pain in his hips. It was three in the morning, and no one could sleep, thanks to the hair-raising cries. Her father vowed to take the twelve-year-old cat to the vet to be put down the next day, but in a last display of true Lovato stubbornness, the cantankerous creature kicked his aging kitty can before he got the chance to be lulled, sitting in Jamie's loving, if bony, lap, into death by lethal injection.

So, when the apartment phone rang at eleven thirty, moments after Jamie had collapsed into bed following another laborious day, which had been commenced with chasing a suspect halfway across Manhattan and completed with the ever-lovely ride home from the gym with an exhausted child, Jamie cringed not only because she just wanted to go the hell to sleep, but also because she hated to recall her childhood pet's painful last moments.

Unfortunately, being a mother and a police officer means answering phone calls 24/7, no matter how long it has been since you last slept. At least, this is what Jamie bitterly mutters as motivation to push herself out of bed and stumble to the closest extension, on the coffee table in the living room – why didn't they put one in their room? – managing to pick it up on the last ring.

"Hello?" she slurs.

"Jamie?"

It takes her a moment to place the voice.

"Coach?"

"What the hell?"

Jamie racks her brain for something she had done that might justify the night shift phone call, but comes up blank.

"Why are you calling so late?"

The other woman, who somehow manages to exude energy and emotion despite the late hour, ignores the question.

"Did you even bother to read the contract you signed when you put your kids on the Advanced Team?"

"What?"

"Did you see the part about no gymnastics competitions unless they were under my name?"

"What are you talking about?"

Jamie hears a keyboard clicking in the background. "This is what I'm talking about!" She wonders if Coach realizes she cannot see whatever is on the computer screen. "Why did a Russian blogger publish an article about Ella winning the all around three competitions in a row in Moscow?"

At the mention of her daughter's name, Jamie's breath catches in her throat. It had been three months since the girl had disappeared, and no leads had appeared from the dust with which the police had started.

"Ella?" she says quietly.

"Is this whole kidnapping thing some kind of a joke? Do you think you can get better training in Moscow? If you feel that way, by all means, send your girls over there – but pretending she was kidnapped-"

"What blog posted this?"

Jamie can see Coach's face contorting with anger at being interrupted.

"I don't know, some Russian blog. But the-"

"Email me the link."

"What?"

"Email me the link to this blog post."

"You're missing-"

"_If you don't email me the link to this goddamn blog post right now, so help me God, I will arrest you for obstruction of justice, do you understand?_"

A pause follows, the only time Jamie had heard Coach speechless. "One minute."

Exactly eighty-three seconds later, Jamie's cell phone, retrieved from her bedside table in record time, vibrates in her hand. _New email from Jasmine McDonald._ There is no subject. The only text is a link, which opens up to a website with enough Russian characters to make Jamie's bleary eyes blur over. But sure enough, a few paragraphs in, there is a picture of Ella, mid-release on the uneven bars, her tiny body laid out, eyes pinned to the small piece of wood that is the only barrier between her and a broken neck. The timestamp claims that the photo was taken less than twelve hours ago.

"She's alive." Jamie nearly whispers it at first, but soon the words become a chant, getting louder and louder until they wake her husband. When Don comes in the living room, Jamie is sobbing, clutching her phone with enough force to turn her knuckles white. The repeated phrase is no longer intelligible, so the detective gently takes the phone.

"She's alive," he mirrors a moment later.

_She's alive._

* * *

Moscow Elite Gymnastics Training Center is an imposing building, to say the least. It towers over the empty field in which it sits, all sharp angles and whitewash walls. The miniscule parking lot is suggestive of the apparent selectiveness of the programs here. Some 98% of the trainees make it onto the Russian national team at some point in their careers.

Jamie simply walks into the building, armed with her service weapon, a wire in her shirt, and the code word "mushroom", which will send Mac, Don, the FBI, and the local police rushing into the gym, pistols ready.

It doesn't take long to find the main gymnastics area. There are two huge windows connecting it to the lobby, which, thankfully, is empty. Inside, there are perhaps ten young girls and twelve adults. Jamie cannot tell if any of them are her daughter.

The door to the gym is unlocked. Once inside, Jamie is assaulted by the freezing air, which must a universal gymnastics tradition, and the familiar smell of chalk and sweat. No one seems to notice her at first, everybody apparently completely consumed by the high-pressure world of gravity-defying children. Jamie's eyes scan over the gymnasts one by one. That girl is too tall; that one, too thick. Those two have the wrong color hair. The one by the vault, her skin is too pale.

Finally, Jamie sees a small, skinny girl, toothpick legs shaking with a mix of fear and exhaustion, bearing the weight of an aging man's Russian screams. Her back is facing the gym door, exposed by a black sports bra and spandex. Her wild hair has been poached, by what Jamie can only guess is about five pounds' worth of hair spray, into an impeccable bun.

Jamie waits until she has gotten a few yards away from her daughter to call out her name.

Ella turns slowly, wary to look away from the man in front of her. At the sight of her mother, tears erupt from her eyes, streaming down her flushed cheeks as she runs over and leaps into Jamie's arms.

The Russian man, obviously not realizing who Jamie was, comes over with a look on his face vile enough to silence an army of dying Oreos. He begins to yell in Russian; when that has no effect, he switches to broken English.

"You cannot come here! Get out!"

"What is your name, sir?"

"You interrupt practice! Out!"

Ella whispers "Olaf Komova" into her mother's ear.

"Mr. Komova, how did you meet this girl?"

"You are not allowed here!"

Mac apparently had enough at this, and Jamie heard the doors to the gym open and the sound of two dozen pairs of feet coming in. The open room became a whirlwind of crying children and quick Russian. The man in front of Jamie is handcuffed and led away, literally kicking and screaming, but she doesn't watch. Instead, hugs Ella to her chest, ignoring the pain of bony knees on her sides, listening to the girl's first words of Spanish in three months.


	16. Chapter 16

Jamie Lovato is not big on skirts. She would patrol the mean streets of Manhattan in skin-tight jeans, and could captivate a jury while sheathed in twenty-dollar dress slacks, but, for as long as she had been alive, Ella had never seen her mother wear a skirt. There were, of course, the mandatory wedding photos strewn throughout the apartment, displaying an unobtainably attractive couple, half of whom wore a goddess-worthy floor-length gown, but that seemed to be the only exception.

Now, coming up to Jamie's collarbone – higher than even the most high-wasted skirt – Ella wouldn't be able to hide behind Jamie's clothes anyway, so what her mother will or will not wear is irrelevant. Despite this, as Ella stretches her short body across the unloving sheets of her hospital bed, looking at everything except the unfamiliar man standing by her, the only thing she can think of is how cheated she was throughout her childhood, raised by a woman who only wears pants. She wonders what it feels like, being surrounded by flowing cloth infused with the comforting scent of one's mother. She supposes she will never find out.

Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, those that hold the most primitive thoughts of food and safety, Ella knows she's loopy. She remembers, if only very slightly, the feeling of intense pain that hurdled throughout her legs and forced the air from her lungs in what she could only assume was a terror-inducing scream.

That pain is completely gone now, along with the majority of her faculties. She is somewhat aware of the beeping of machines around her, the tube leading from the limp bag above her head down to her arm, where a hair-thin needle supplies her body with the liquid, unassuming in appearance, that is keeping her from pulling her hair out in agony. She cannot really process the doctor in front of her, in his commanding knee-length white coat that screams _I'm better than you_, the customary stethoscope that gives authority to the owner of the neck around which it is wrapped, despite being nothing more than a pretentious microphone.

Ella does not like doctors, because whenever her father talks about them he is either cursing them for not being able to kill the cancer in his grandmother before it killed her, or he is referencing the violence of his recent case. If she had any bit of her wits about her, Ella would be resisting this man's examination of her with every last bit of what her uncles called _that Lovato attitude_, but, as it were, she is sitting motionless as he pokes and prods her numb skin.  
This lack of awareness is probably the reason that Ella is determinedly thinking about skirts while what could have been her career is falling to dust around her. She hears but does not register the muted conversation between the doctor and her parents, with words big enough to twist the most adept of tongues and scary phrases like _permanent damage_ and _probably never again_. She is not affected by the muted, strained atmosphere in the room, nor moved by the look on her mother's face, an upsetting combination of fear and pity. She is completely serene when a new drug enters her system, injected into her IV by a nurse she did not notice, and pushes her into an all-consuming sleep.

* * *

Once Dr. Sparrow – who had somehow managed to convince Ella, while the girl was zoned out on enough morphine to satisfy even the most hard core junkie, that, despite her name, she was not, in fact, a pirate – finished her daily machine check, Adah always gets up stealthily from one of the cheap plastic visitor's chairs and hops into bed beside her sister. The nurses hated it, for the kinds of reasons that start out seemingly intelligent at the level of health department officials but end up being all but vestigial by the time they reach the actual hands-on care of an injured teenager, but after a week in the hospital, the girls had learned how to hide it from the medical professionals.

They would lay side-by-side in the narrow bed, bony hips touching, staring at two cast-enveloped legs next to two bare ones, and talk. It wasn't the idle, nervous chatting that occurred between Ella and her parents, where they talked about everything and nothing; Adah was not afraid to broach the topics her parents avoided like the plague, like pain and surgery and long-term implications. Ella would tell Adah about the nurses, which ones were nice and let her have extra ice cream after dinner and which ones refused even the most kind-hearted attempts at conversation. She would reveal all Dr. Sparrow's incredibly annoying idiosyncrasies, like how she had never once said "you", always using the royal "we". She would talk about how, at night, once all the visitors had reluctantly gone home and the only visible life in the whole ward was the suicide-watch nurse patrolling the long corridors, she would think about gymnastics. She would remember, specifically, the uneven bars, her favorite apparatus as well as the one that landed her in the hospital, relive the illusion of flying during each release, a feeling all the experts said she would probably never experience again.

On the days when it hurt too much to talk, Adah would read to her sister. Both girls had a special kind of magic when it came to reading aloud, the kind of thing that makes teachers call on you to voice passages when you haven't raised your hands. Adah invented different voices for each character and moved her free hand with excitement, distracting Ella from the depressing realities of hospital life, mushy food and bedpans. Adah was there every day from 2:35, the soonest she could arrive after school, until being shooed out by a nurse at 8, a solid hour after all visitors were supposed to be gone. Ella knew she would get home exhausted, eat a small dinner and trudge through her four hours of homework, sacrificing sleep for her sister. But she faithfully continued for three weeks, until Ella was discharged. Even then, in the room the girl shared, they would lie next to each other in Ella's bed, Adah doing homework on her lap while Ella attempted to catch up in Calculus.

Physical therapy hurt in a way Ella had never imagined. It was not a cutting pain, really, at least not in the way her fall had been. It was more aqueous, spreading throughout her body and leaving a trace of ache when she went home. But Adah was there for that, too, always ready, regardless of how many miles her current to-do list stretched, for a post-PT stop at a café to drink overly-expensive tea and talk about how much it sucked to have two broken legs.

Three months after plummeting from the bars in the gym, it became clear to Ella that she would not return to gymnastics. Twelve weeks away from the sport could be crushing to a career in itself, even if she had not spent that time mostly on bed rest. Her once rock-hard abs had become soft skin while she lay useless in bed, her arms and legs shrinking until even pull-ups became inconceivable. She knew that she could probably one day return to the level she had achieved in early grade school, petty flips on the floor and single-twisting vaults, before her body gave out, but she saw no reason for that to interest her. It took a pile of medical bills a foot high for her to realize what her sister had a year ago: she was sick and tired of gymnastics. She was done with the endless hours in that high-ceilinged room, doing the same stunts over and over, the constant berating from Coach, the back-to-back weekends away from home. She accepted that that tumble off the bars was the end of her gymnastics career, and, following in Adah's footsteps, she set her sights on dance.


	17. Chapter 17

Take Your Child to Work Day represented one of multiple dark spots on the patchwork quilt that was Don Flack's childhood. One fateful April day every year, he and his siblings would trudge through those infamous showers promising flowers to school, weighed down with the conviction that their father did not truly love them, and sit through classes with all the other rejected children, while the kids who actually had caring parents played desk jockey for a few hours. The explanations from Don Senior, of the danger for them and aggravation for him that would result if the youngest generation of Flacks spent the day in the precinct, fell on deaf ears. Not only was this day a chance to skip school – the childhood equivalent in thrill to a weekend in Vegas with an unlimited credit card – but it was an opportunity to observe the job that allowed Dad to come home, night after night, and brood over dinner in silence before ruling the TV for the few drunken hours that he was awake.

Unfortunately, no amount of begging or bargaining could surpass Don Senior's impregnable fortress of "no", and so Junior and his siblings never got to accompany their father to work. And, in hindsight, it was probably for the best. Now, as Don stares a dead body in what is left of its eyes, he can only imagine the havoc his daughters, working in tandem with the rest of his coworkers' children, are reeking on the precinct.

* * *

Once the initial excitement of seeing where Mommy and Daddy worked wore off, and the group had grown tired of their combined supply of card games – which was, in a word, shoddy – they moved on to Truth or Dare. Lucy managed to convince the younger kids to start an under-twelve game of Go Fish, which allowed the older group a new level of possibilities.

As one must, they started with the ground rules. Nothing blatantly sexual, nothing illegal, nothing unreasonably dangerous, nothing that could cause anyone or anything permanent harm. Still, that left nearly endless potential for humiliation, which was, of course, the point of the game.

For the first half an hour, few noteworthy things happened. It was the grace period, the time when everyone was testing the waters, seeing who would do what and how much they would get away with. Nothing occurred outside the interrogation room they had borrowed for the game. Paula Hawkes revealed that she had, once, at a party, took a sip of what was probably very cheap wine, and it tasted terrible. Rob Taylor's dare, for Adah to lick his face, was contested under the grounds of pretty clear sexual intent, but eventually allowed. It was discovered that Lucy Messer's first kiss with tongue – as if others really counted – had occurred at the age of fourteen with a boy from her class who smelled like permanent marker and could draw crazy scary cartoon characters.

As usual, no one wanted to be the first to get out of this relatively innocent stage. The burden, Adah decided, fell on her, because her sister was there, and she could dare her sister to do anything, because they were related. And so, after she got back from rinsing her mouth of the grease on Rob's cheek, she waited patiently for her turn, thinking of the worst possible dare that fell within the set rules.

When she got the chance – following an easy truth question, had she ever cut herself, _no_ – she smiled at Ella.

"I dare you to go outside, stand on Dad's desk, and write your name with your butt."

Butt-name-writing was Coach's favorite post-post-loss-sit-ups humiliation technique. Adding insult to injury – or, at least, adding insult to sore arms. It was a simple concept; stand up, pretend your butt is the tip of a pencil, and write your name in the air. It looked ridiculous, but really wasn't difficult.

Of course, Ella had never been asked – rather, dared – to do this in front of an entire building of adults who would most likely find a gyrating fifteen-year-old not at all funny, but definitely scold-worthy.

"That is sexual," she protests.

"Oh, come on, it is _not_."

"Yes, it is. I'll look like I'm doing some slutty dance."

"You'll look like you're doing squats or something."

"There could be perverts out there. Or rapists."

"Please. They'd be in hand cuffs, and not where everyone is working."

"You don't know that."

"You think with all of us in here they'd be keeping the child molesters in plain sight?"

The others stayed quiet in this debate, probably pondering what exactly writing your name with your butt was.

"I could mess something up on Dad's desk."

"Take your shoes off and don't step on anything."

"I could fall."

"Like you've never fallen off things before."

This elicits a chuckle from Rob, who is probably equating it to some sex act, while Adah was actually referring to the daily tumbles one sustains in gymnastics. Both girls ignore him.

"Adah, I can't do that."

"You can, you just don't want to."

Ella doesn't respond, because her sister is right. She is perfectly capable of doing what she was dared to do. She weighs for a moment which threat is worse: not performing a dare, humiliating in its own respect, or probably being banned from Take Your Child to Work Day on her very first celebration of it.

After a minute, she pushes back from the metal table more accustomed to angered fists than shaking fingers, and walks through the door. She makes out her sister's afterthought call, full name, as she crosses the threshold. Police officers and detectives move around quickly, all daunting with their look of abstract conviction, of doing something important, and the exact definition of "something" on a strict need-to-know basis, a need Ella lacked. She sees her mother leaned over her computer keyboard, typing with vehemence severe enough to send clacking sounds across the room. Her father's desk is adjacent; Jamie will be one of the first to notice her daughter making a complete fool of herself.

Ella swallows and, not allowing herself more caustic chickening-out time, slips out of her shoes and hops up onto the desk. She is careful not to knock any of the meticulously stacked papers out of place, keeping her agile feet in the small vacant area between the back of the computer monitor and the edge of the wood.

She drops her butt down in the jerky corners of an uppercase E just as her mother looks up. Ella refuses to meet her eyes, staring at the ceiling as she goes through the familiar routine. Rough L's and curved A's. Her name seems to stretch on forever, despite containing only five syllables. She imagines her mother's look of stunned silence.

When finally the last tick of the K has finished, she hops down and surveys the damage. Every eye in the room is tuned to her. She is perfectly aware that what she did probably looked like some amateur-erotica dance. She is suddenly overcome with the strange urge to scream out that she is, in fact, on track to become a professional dancer, should she so desire, and that what she was doing right there was not, by any means, an accurate display of her dancing skills. Instead, she turns on her heel, brown hair whipping her face, and, before her mother can say anything, she runs back into the interrogation room, slamming the door shut behind her, cushioned by the euphoric laughter of the children inside.


End file.
